I caught an article announcing the news that FedEx has rolled out a new ad campaign. Ad campaigns can be so varied these days so I was curious to dig in and learn more. It turns out that the branding campaign by the shipping company contains a fair amount of social media with videos and employee stories.
Needless to say I wanted to check this out. I found some positives and negatives to the campaign, but overall I give FedEx an “A” for effort. They’re trying to create a brand image of a global, yet personal service. From the screenshots below (of the TV spots and of a story) you can see what I mean – visually you get the feeling that although they are a global company, they want the shipping of your package to be personal.
The stories are engaging and show everyday workers making a difference. The TV spots are quick snippets of stories with the distinct message to visit the website for more. Like I said, they did a good job of presenting the stories and drawing the viewer in.Now, the other side of the coin is execution. The main site is built in Flash so your computer needs to be updated with Flash – not a big deal as most computers are equipped. But, the Flash presentation took close to a minute or more to load. I understand that the site just launched and traffic is probably high, but they should have been more prepared for that. If I wasn’t writing about this topic, I likely wouldn’t have waited around to see the site. Next, it wasn’t 100% clear what I was supposed to do when it loaded. I finally located the icon on the top left of the screen and pressed it launching the next step.
See, I think to really pull off a campaign like this, there can be absolutely no work for the user. Seeing the content is not mission critical to the user and they’ll abandon at the first instance of resistance. Waiting for load and searching for the first step are not good.
I should note that I closed my browser and went back in and it loaded quickly so maybe that was a one-time thing.
I’ll be curious to see how the TV spots look on screen and also to see how strong the call to action is in the upcoming print ads. But, they have the potential to drive large amounts of traffic and I think the “Shipping is Global yet Personal” brand theme plays real clear.
